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Seething volcano buried under Antarctica’s ice

By Michael Marshall

IT’S a land of ice and fire. For the first time, an active volcano has been spotted rumbling away under the ice sheet of west Antarctica.

There are lots of volcanoes above and below the Antarctic ice but none of the subsurface ones were known to be active. That changed when seismographs in western Antarctica detected two clusters of tremors in 2010, and again in 2011. Their depth and frequency suggest they were the result of shifting magma.

The tremors occurred under a rise in the bedrock, which protrudes by about a kilometre but isn’t tall enough to stick out of the ice. Amanda Lough of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, who made the observations, says this may be the volcanic cone.

The volcano was probably created by a tectonic rift running under west Antarctica, where Earth’s crust is being pulled apart and molten rock is welling up from beneath. “People thought Antarctica was aseismic,” says Lough. “It definitely isn’t. It’s a lot livelier than people assumed.”

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If the volcano erupts, the molten rock will melt the base of the ice, hastening the ice sheet’s break-up (Nature Geoscience, doi.org/p45).

This article appeared in print under the headline “Stirring volcano found under Antarctica”